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Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Fear and Self-Loathing in Denver (Part 3)

A Literary Homage from the Depraved Center of a Cultural Revolution

Yuppies Ruin Everything... (End of the Rainbow) - 4 May, 2015

Sweet Jesus, how long has it been? Two weeks today since
that strange day in Denver. I’m sitting here now, in my own living room,
looking out the window and the sky is half blue and half black. A giant
thunderhead is rolling off to the north on 40 MPH winds after drizzling over
most of town. From the west, the harsh, hard, setting 5 o’clock sun is forming
the most intense rainbow I’ve ever seen against what would be the backdrop of
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains if they weren’t hidden behind the fogbank that
the low thunderhead has become. It’s truly a wonderful sight, even despite the
irony that the rainbow ends directly on top of the house across our fence that
serves as a drive thru window for meth and heroin. The neighborhood junkies’
“pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow. Last year it was raided twice. Those
must have been dark times for the living zombies I watch lurch up and down Agua
Fria most afternoons.

For the past 2 hours, I’ve been sitting here, staring out
that window at the gloom and drizzle, refreshing Facebook every few minutes,
watching Jon Oliver rant about everything nobody knows is fucking us, and idly
packing Tim’s old wizard pipe, staring at a bunch of fragmented notes on an otherwise
blank page that are supposed to outline the conclusion to this jangled saga of
the depressing realities I came face to face with on that awful trip to Denver.
That’s a lie. I had a good time. But thinking about the thing as a whole
depresses me. There’s no promise of a bright future. Only the exact future
we’ve been building for ourselves as a society for the last several decades.
It’s almost a perfect summary of everything the 80s, 90s, and post-9/11 era
were about, at their core. Looking back it seems our present socially starved
limbo of hyper-narcissism was inevitable – like the return of the strung out,
wiry old woman that just parallel parked for 5 minutes before walking into the
“dispensary” of her choice – and I struggle to find solace in the knowledge
that the potheads and stoners I’ve always thought of as “my people” are by and
large no longer thought of by society as comparable to the folks that come and
go all day, to and from the crack-den across the way.

Especially when that legitimacy comes at the price of losing
our bizarre brand of comradery to the same corporate evils that have hollowed
out the center of every great American tradition from baseball to the
investigative journalism. It hurts to look this closely at the patterns. This
same thing happens every time young people try to create a cultural identity of
their own. Seattle, Austin, Brooklyn… now Denver. Every time a large number of
young people move somewhere – because they’re poor and it’s cheap – and they
successfully define their culture on their own terms, it inevitably becomes
“cool,” and there are sharks in the water before anyone has the presence of
mind to recognize what’s happening. It’s like watching a nature documentary,
helplessly rooting for the small, isolated young gazelle, split from the herd,
as it falls prey to a wily pack of predators, simply engaging in the perpetual
natural rhythm.

The greatest tragedy, quite possibly, is that Denver was
“over” before it was even really “cool.” Denver never got to really define its
cultural personality in any mainstream way before it was inundated with
commercialism and mercilessly gentrified. That said, this could prove to be a
blessing in disguise, as the music and art scenes will likely never be as
intensely commercially exploited here as, for instance, Seattle in the 90s.

I’m not saying, by any means, that the music or art scenes
in Denver are in any way “over.” Those fighting that fight are resilient and
inspired as ever. Their fight is simply that much harder for all the attention
their city is getting for other reasons. Rising rents are forcing small DIY
venues to compete on a level many can’t keep up with, but the few that do are
at the cutting edge of what could be this generation’s defining art form: the
house party. Specifically, the DIY concert hosted at a multimedia art/living
space.

Millennials grew up multitasking. We were raised by the 90s,
activity-centric soccer mom mentality, and it’s no surprise we’re all jacks of
many trades. Everyone I know is in a few bands, does some sort (or several) of
art, and/or engages in some sort of expressive art form, be it dance, acting,
or what have you. So it’s natural that when you get several of us together, our
living spaces often become multifaceted funhouses of creative expression. I will
repeat this sentiment to my dying breath: every one of the best concerts I’ve
been to has been in someone’s basement, living room, or garage. And more and
more of these strange group dwellings are realizing that a party only gets
better if the walls are painted random colors, covered in weird art, and
flooded with engaging projections. DIY house venues may not be a new invention,
but they now represent the pulse of almost every modern art form. From music to
painting, to performance art, they are to the rest of the country what Austin’s
dive bars are to their scene. There’s an entire circuit of DIY music that’s
spawned from the love affair between the internet and rock and roll’s affinity
for couch-crashing. Bands can travel indefinitely, touring up and down both
coasts, and through the middle of the country for almost no money, playing
living rooms, porches, barns, roofs, alleyways, and anywhere else a bunch of
young people are gathering to get drunk and rub up against each other. Even a
one-horse retirement community like Santa Fe has a thriving (if small)
underground DIY scene, but Denver’s is the quintessence of how a DIY scene is
supposed to be run.

***

The secondary objective in our journey was a concert taking
place at one of the oldest DIY venues not only in Denver, but maybe in the
whole country. Rhinoceropolis celebrated its 10th anniversary last
weekend, making it the oldest DIY venue I’ve ever been to, and cementing its
reputation as a pillar of the local scene. We were planning on catching Annabelle Chairlegs, an act composed partially of our old schoolmates, veterans of the
DIY circuit, now based out of Austin.

But in the state we found ourselves after the Cannabis Cup,
the fear began to arise in me that we would not make it that far. Zenon and Amy
were asleep in the back, and we were on a quest for coffee, lest we succumb to
similar fates. I actually don’t drink the stuff, but I was so despondent from
what I had witnessed at the Cup that I found myself close to the edge of total,
irrational despair. What would I write about? Surely there was nothing to learn
from the fact that the culture marijuana users slowly developed between one
another over the course of half a century of hiding from the law like plague
rats is now being turned into the new frontier of cutthroat capitalism and
being sold as t-shirts and trucker hats to kids who will never know a world
where you can do jail time for a joint. We’ve gone from incarcerating people
for their vices to making money off them. Maybe that’s what truly defines this
country, and everyone that allows themselves to buy into the “Dream.” Nothing
pure cannot be corrupted with the promise of legitimacy and a barrel of cash.

It was a dark moment. Worse yet, finding a cup of coffee in
Denver after 4 PM is, as Dylan would say, in the words of Macho Man, Randy
Savage, “Like men playing with boys: It ain’t gonna happen.” The third coffee
shop we arrived at turned out to be open, thankfully, and as we sat inside,
staring idly at our phones, I began to realize the dark reality of the
situation. It was perfectly put by the girl behind the counter when I
asked her opinion of living in Denver at this moment in time. “Maybe it’s
because I’m from New York,” she prefaced, “But I just have no respect for a
city that defines itself with pot, skiing, and cross-fit training. Especially
cross-fit,” she added, “I fucking hate that shit.”

An alarm went off in my head from that statement. My mistake
all along had been that I was relying on an image other people held in their minds
for my own sense of identity. That’s what yuppies do – buy their personality in
an applicable paste. I’d seen the scumbags on every street corner since coming
to this town, and every conversation I’d had with anyone about the major
differences between Denver “then and now” came down to the massive influx of yuppies,
here to grab their slice of all the cash that’s being thrown around the pot
fields.

“We brought in 80,000 people last year,” JD had told me that
morning, “I grew up in a historic neighborhood, so all the homes were over 100
years old. That neighborhood used to be young families with blue collar jobs.
But now it’s doctors and lawyers moving in next door and the diversity has gone
way down. The reason for that is the area’s gotten a lot more expensive.” The
hope is that, with this influx of money and youth, the city will move more
toward being a hub for art and music. JD mentioned the booming Rhino (River
North) Arts District, but as I would find out that evening, a commercial boom
is not always in the best interest of an art district.

You see, the problem with living near yuppies is that there
is never enough money for them. JD explained the process perfectly, from the
perspective of someone who watched it happen to his own neighborhood, “It’s not
that people are being forced to sell their properties,” he says, “It’s just,
they realize they can make some quick easy cash and move out to a suburb. Then
someone comes and flips the house and turns it into a duplex. And suddenly
where there was one family and a large plot of land, now there’s two families
and they each have a small plot of land. It’s just packing it in. [This
attracts] the same kind of people – the kind who can afford it – and that’s
just young professional white people. They come in, get a job downtown, with a
starting salary of $65,000 a year, and they get a house right nearby. And a lot
of them just flip homes on the side, too, so they actually perpetuate the
problem.” They make more money and attract more yuppies. As JD pointed out, the
ironic joke is that, “[It’s] money they end up having to spend, because they
affect their own cost of living.”

One important obstacle most of the people flocking to Denver
aren’t thinking about right now is the most obvious to those of us who grew up
in the desert. “With 80,000 people moving here – and with California being in a
drought – and they take water from Colorado as well – so… We’re gonna need that
water eventually. And the more Denver grows, and the denser it gets, we’re
gonna need to make sure that water gets to the right place.”

But based on what’s happening in the Rhino District, the
newcomers aren’t likely to wise up to the issue anytime soon. Talking to Ben,
who was running sound at Rhinoceropolis that night, I got a firsthand account of
how it looks when “progress” moves in next door.

“I’ve never seen a block change so quickly,” he explained, “The
money just came through. Now there’s an artisan beef place and a market right
there,” he points down the street. “It’s been an industrial neighborhood since
the 1800s. It was always steel plants, and this is the first time it’s being
gentrified.”

A native of Huston, who left when Austin started exploding,
he has an interesting perspective on the crowd that follows these “scenes.” “There’s
people who come to places because they hear a certain thing is changing,” Ben
says, “And it becomes oversaturated with people who are just interested in
hype.” This has caused a new paradigm in how populations migrate. Ben
continues, “People used to move places because of jobs. Now they don’t go
because of jobs, they just go because it’s cool. It’s a double edged sword. [People]
want indie film scenes, and DIY music and art. But the more people want that –
with their money – the more it becomes impossible, because the money corrupts
it. This is the ‘Rhino Arts District.’ [Rhinoceropolis] has been around longer
than the [name] ‘Rhino Art District,’ and yet nobody knows about it. But
they’re bringing in so much money that nobody can afford to live here. They
want it to be an arts district but they’re kicking out all the artists.”

The local supporting acts were all tremendously engaging and
brought a diverse, interested crowd. You know it’s a good show when even
between sets, this fucking guy is feeling it this hard. Maybe that’s just a
testament to whatever he took in preparation for the night, but the fact
remains that freaks like he and I wouldn’t be welcome if this party was
organized by the same people as the Cannabis Cup. Not without a cool $50 at the
door and possibly an insurance waiver.

I had a hard time watching the show. It’s a strong testament
to my pessimism, but every time I see an organic, beautiful project of
self-expression arise among a group like that, I get sad. Especially with one
as established as Rhinoceropolis, I just can’t shake the ugly realization that
one day it is going to end. Usually DIY venues operate for a year or maybe two
or three, and then people move, and the scene goes to a new place. But when a
DIY venue becomes an establishment, like this place, the inevitable demise is
an actual, perceptible detriment to the community. The worst part is, with the
right public subsidies, there’s no reason spaces like Rhino couldn’t be
sustained. But sadly, respectable society’s idea of “progress” revolves around
property value. And these days it seems there’s no room for beauty at the
expense of the bottom line.

I had to look away. I was happy that my old friend Daniel
had shown up. We wandered around the space, taking pictures of the walls and
the stories they told. Since his childhood, Daniel has been playing East
African music, and now he teaches it in Boulder, to ease the white guilt of those
very same yuppies that are unwittingly threatening to end this oasis of honest
expression. Hanging out with Daniel always tends to level me out, which, after
the day’s events, was my only hope for warding off catatonic bewilderment. I
was clinging to the frayed ends of reason as we sat in the parking lot and I recounted
the day’s events to him, between sips of a Rainier tallboy (A momentary respite
from my distress came an hour or so earlier when Zenon had found my
favorite shitty beer at a liquor store. The biggest advantage to this sort of
concentration of hipsters is a healthy selection of beers).

Once, many years ago, Daniel and I sat on a couch at a party
at Jenny Luna’s house, very much like this one. There wasn’t a band, but the
mood of the night, at least from my perspective, was very similar. Maybe that’s
just a symptom of exhaustion. Either way, at this party, years before, Daniel
and I had agreed, at one point, in a very high and drunk state that we both
felt the strange time dilation I described earlier; as though we had always
been sitting on that couch, listening to Tinariwen. And, regardless of where we
went in twenty minutes or twenty years, we’d likely, in some universe, always be
sitting on that couch, listening to Tinariwen. We occasionally still text each
other from great distances, reminding one another – when we remember ourselves
– that we’re really still just sitting on Jenny Luna’s couch, listening to
Tinariwen. It is a thought that has comforted me on many nights when my demons
and self-doubt loomed fiercely and I found myself unsure that – as another
friend is often fond of reminding me in moments like these – the sun would in
fact rise tomorrow, and everything would be back to normal. And on the evening
of April 20, it definitely kept me from going over the proverbial edge of
despair and diving straight to the bottom of a bottle.

Instead, I hung out with Daniel. We left the show early, as
he, too, had been awake since very early, and was eager to get home. The
friends I’d come up here with were driving back after the show, and, faced with
the option of sleeping in a car or on a couch, I opted for the latter. I would
simply take a Greyhound home from Boulder the next morning (or so I thought).
On the drive to his house, Daniel and I discussed getting old, and the steps we
so reluctantly stand on the brink of, along with so many of our peers. Friends
are having children. Parents are dying. Soon we will be “average Americans.”
Soon we will be adults. Might have already happened, and we’re just now
realizing. That’s a very threatening proposition for a group of people that
still very much enjoys cartoons and keg parties. It’s not that we’re not ready.
It’s that we’ve known this was an eventuality since we were old enough to
understand the news that was blared at us 24 hours a day. The minute we take
responsibility for where we go as a society, we’re also taking responsibility
for where we are as a society, and
nobody wants to do that. That’s why every generation that goes by identifies
that much more readily with counterculture; “culture” is rearranging deck
chairs on the Titanic.

Millennials will very likely – in the next decade or so, as
they start to have more and more children (and they will, despite whatever
trends you read about on the internet) – become just as obsessed with money as
everyone that came before them. But eventually (possibly quite soon), we will
live in a world that nobody wants to bring more children into. Until that day,
this cycle, of young people pushing the edge of creative culture and being
immediately co-opted, commercialized, sold-out and abandoned by the Market of
Cool will continue to perpetuate itself like clockwork. Everyone needs to make
a buck. Even I intend to sell these words I wrote about it. Because wherever
young people are converging, there is money to be made. That’s the real
American Dream. Being young enough to grab what you can in the name of
progress. Then you make kids of your own and they find a new way to start the
circle again. God bless us, every one.

The next day as Daniel and I walked to a taco truck several
blocks from his house, we came across a shelf of books on a corner with a sign,
reading, “Community Library.” Daniel stopped to browse through the available
titles, only to find self-help guides and trashy airport paperback fiction.

“I like the concept,” he laughed, as we walked away, “Just
not the selection.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Long Way Home

It turns out the quickest, cheapest way to get from
Denver/Boulder back to Santa Fe, New Mexico is to rent a car. If that’s out of
your price range, you’re probably not welcome anyway. I had never rented a car,
as I don’t own a credit card, but nevertheless, Daniel and I were able to
convince the man at the dealership that we are responsible people. If he rented
a car “to Daniel” and signed me up as a “secondary driver,” I assured the man I
would get it back to Santa Fe in one piece.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the exchange, he was
only able to rent me one of Kia’s drivable toasters, the newest model of which,
the Soul, is legal on the highway and can reach speeds of almost 80 MPH. That
said, the upholstery was very pleasantly toast-scented, which lasted most of
the duration of my trip back south. Upon entering the Pecos wilderness, as the
sun set, and I sped the last stretch toward home, I was overcome with the urge
to feel the wind in my face, and I rolled down all the windows for a good 30 or
40 miles, listening to nothing but the sound of the evening desert air blast around
me and trying to wrap my head around everything I’d seen the day before.

“Well no one really knows
what you’re talking about, so I guess we’re already there. And no one opens up
when you scream and shout, so it’s time to make a couple things clear. If
you’re afraid of what you need… If you’re afraid of what you need… Look around
you. You’re surrounded. It won’t get any better.”

-“Home,”
LCD Soundsystem

I’m still just trying to process it all. That’s the problem
with trying to define a paradigm as you live it. There’s too much information
that you just can’t look at with honest eyes while you’re knee deep in
experiencing it. The Gonzo thing seems to address that particular shortcoming
of human perception, with the liberal application of drugs and alcohol forcing
you to look at the culture you’re engaging in with what I like to refer to as
“soft eyes…” But who can live like that all the time? Especially with these God
awful deadlines?

Ten years from now, we will have a lot more perspective on
what was accomplished in places like Rhinoceropolis, and perhaps their
influence will be a lot more permanent than that of pot culture, which will eat
itself alive faster than skateboarding and punk rock combined. Twenty years
from now, when Cheech and Chong seem as strange and dated as the Charleston,
perhaps commercial art and music will have collapsed into a free-for-all of
artist-run DIY venues and exhibition spaces, and maybe we’ll all be laughing
about the days when we allowed corporate entities to try to dictate the
direction of popular art for profit.

I hope that day comes soon, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m just going to keep going to house shows. Awful hacks will always cling to
whatever new thing becomes cool, but that’s what keeps pushing people to
innovate further. The hacks are the ones that wallow in what has already been
established as cool, without adding anything of their own to it. There’s
nothing wrong with taking inspiration from whatever moves you, it’s when you
fail to make it your own that it becomes stale, and the problem with most
commercial ventures is that, once the money’s involved, nobody is willing to
risk deviating from the established formula.

The only advice I have for anyone that feels the
irresistible urge to create in this climate of self-interest verging on
absolute narcissism is to not be afraid of the tendency to talk about what you
know, even if nobody seems to care. Just do it with honesty, and as long as it’s
true to your experience, somebody will relate.

“Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. There is water at
the bottom of the ocean.”